Still working on objects, walls and a lot of behind the scenes stuff. Inching closer and closer every day to working on the play state!

Few notable changes:- Time of day adjustment moved to the center of the top GUI.- Walls are now "objects" (they used to be treated like terrain because objects didn't exist yet).- Object placement is mostly done, assuming there's no kinks all that's really left is code cleanup.- Started adding some basic sound effects; button clicking, object placement, etc.- Grid mode updated, now is color coded so you can easily see whats passable by entities and what isn't.- "Select" tool is now a "grab" tool, original plan was to have it select objects, but there's no need for that in the map editor. So now it picks up objects so you can move them around.- Lots of refactoring/behind the scenes stuff.

Some shots with the new walls/object placement, and a shot with the new gridmode enabled.(EDIT: Fixed screenshots, silly me linked the wrong ones)

I noticed that too! Yeah for Architecture 1 . Seriously though, this game is looking great

hah, good catch! Whoops!

I'll fix that in a bit when I add a few more brushes, maybe I'll have a chamfered *and* a filleted square brush. I built an entire brush class specifically to handle brush shapes, so why not have more options just for the sake of having them?

There are now 4 brush types; Round, Chamfered, Filleted, and Square. The GUI also now has a toggle button you can use to cycle through the brushes (Left hand tab), and when the brush is displayed on screen you now only see an outline instead of the entire brush.

Been experimenting with map sizes. I think I've settled on each map being 1024x1024 with multiple starting spots. The idea behind the massive map sizes is for replayabliliy. That way, you can play a map over and over again, trying to find that "sweet spot" you can survive the longest on.

Here's an idea of just how large these maps are!

Here's the raw minimap, where 1 pixel = 1 tile. Obviously this is an incompleted map. I just drew in the top corner.(1024x1024 image, but the width is locked to 800 on the forum)

Here's the same minimap image above, but actually in game on the full screen minimap. Notice the white bounding box in the top leftish, that's the current location of the map in the game.

...and here's the spot the map was focused on.

So as you can see, this games going to have massive maps that are impossible to fully explore on one play through. The current plans are that depending on the maps configuration, maps will have a single starting point, a complete random one or a collection of preset/selectable ones.

I have some long term plans for a random map generator, but the main game will be handcrafted maps. The map generator would a bonus side thing for fun and not part of the main game.

You could make the maps semi-procedural. Generate a few for yourself, pick one that you like and clean up and add the important parts by hand.Making 1024x1024 maps by hand will truly take a long time, but who knows, if you have the patience and creativity (which I'm sure you do) it'll might worth the time investment in the end.

One idea I got while reading this is: maybe keep ruins etcetera of earlier playthroughs on the map? I believe Dwarf Fortress does something like that. E.g. you play and get overrun at some point, then next playthrough maybe you run into the ruins of your earlier castle, now overrun with goblins.

I like how the undone areas look like rips in the map as if it was paper, it would be cool if your fog of war or whatever looked like that... not sure how practical that would be though.

That was the idea! I was themeing(theming?) most of my maps after, well, "maps". The theme for the forest maps were kinda tattered and torn like an old treasure map. Where as the theme for the desert maps were charred and burned up maps. Many of the others may not even look like paper maps at all, but those two were. Generally every map would also have a decay/damage theme to it of some kind. The running most common theme being paper. Some of the more off the wall maps may go in totally different directions though.

As for fog of war, I'm debating not actually having it at all. Reason being is you don't do much exploring in this game as much as you scramble to find a safe place to survive. But once you're there, you will seldom leave the general area. So fog of war will just take away from the "grand" perceptions of the map. Although the entities will probably have line-of-sight, but you as the player will still be able to see the entire map, mobs included. The idea behind doing it that way is to make the world look that much more intimidating because you can actually watch as the entire map is slowly overran by hundreds upon thousands of bad guys.

One idea I got while reading this is: maybe keep ruins etcetera of earlier playthroughs on the map? I believe Dwarf Fortress does something like that. E.g. you play and get overrun at some point, then next playthrough maybe you run into the ruins of your earlier castle, now overrun with goblins.

I really like that idea, although I'm not 100% sure it could work in the standard game mode. But I'll put it on my list of ideas to play with down the road. If anything, I could add a special "replay" mode that does exactly that. One mode could be your standard "new game" where as the other mode is "replay" mode, that takes the map you've already played (and died) on and restarts you somewhere else.

I tweaked the minimap generation to make the topography more defined, and then started working on the map again.

Looks cool! How are you doing outlining the different terrain types?

I have a final check before it applies the pixel color to the minimap's topography buffer that checks the tiles in the positions in all 4 directions of the tile you're updating. If any of those return 0 (IE: no tile), it darkens itself before applying the color.

The gameplay is minimal at the moment, a lot of the work I've been doing has been in-prep to get the gameplay going. Right now the gameplay consists of a collection of pieces and parts but the actual "playing" doesn't quite exist yet. I had/have to finish the map editor first since a lot of the gameplay needs a lot of the map manipulation functions and object placement functions working.

..and, it finally does! But I'm just polishing off the last of the map editor functions and completing the first full map. Once that's done I'll be moving into gameplay mechanics. It should go pretty fast once I do, since so much boilerplate stuff is done already (Blood particles, terrain manipulation, pathfinding, search patterns, basic AI/combat, basic spawning). The big thing that was holding me back from working on the gameplay was the lack of a proper object system for buildings, since you can't control entities directly. The only way to control them is through the buildings and balance controls, so up until recently (about a week ago) I was unable to really do anything in the play mode. But, now I can! So I should start working on the play mode pretty soon. My list of things left to add to the map editor is extremely short right now.

This is the first 100% functional (and hopefully stable) build, ready for producing maps!

Notable features since the last build:- Mac and Linux support.- Updated to LWJGL 2.9.1- Added new "float" font for floating descriptions.- Button descriptions don't leave the bounds of the view port.- Antialiasing forced to 0. (Should help with some people who have funky video card settings)- Objects system, can now place, grab, and delete objects.- Lighting system now runs faster- Minimap almost completely rewritten, now instead of a drop down it takes up the entire screen.- Map size increased to 1024x1024- Tabs are now opened/closed by clicking on tab categories.- Erase tool can now be toggled between Erase All, Erase Terrain, Erase Topography and Erase Objects.- Can now use the "Hide topography" button to see whats under the top layers.- Few basic sound effects added (most of them are temporary)- 4 Brush types; Circle, Chamfered, Filleted and Square.- Brush size maximum increased to 30.- Map writer now does not cause a heap. Sends output to /maps/yourmapname/yourmapnameFull.png- Added a basic loading screen.- Can now select various map sizes. (Large, Medium, Small and Empty)- "Black Lines" glitch potentially fixed.- Tons of other tweaks and optimizations.

EVERYONE: Please report back with every single glitch you find, no matter how tiny.

MAC AND LINUX USERS: Please report back with any problems. I have limited capabilities to test both systems.

I dunno if you already mentioned this, sorry if you did. It crashes when I load in the quiet forest, if I don't run the jar by command line. It's probably unique to my system because of it being... my system.. but you said to report everything so there you go

On a side note, the sound that occurs when you place something from the building section scared the shit out of me. I'm guessing you already have this planned, but some background music or at least some additional sounds wouldn't make that one thing sound so abrupt.

I love it!

Was I before Chuang Tzu who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being Chuang Tzu?

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